Fernando Rey

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Alternative Title:
Fernando Casado Arambillet Veiga

Fernando Rey, (FERNANDO CASADO ARAMBILLET VEIGA), Spanish actor (born Sept. 20, 1917, La Coruña, Spain—died March 9, 1994, Madrid, Spain), excelled at portraying suave, complex villains, especially in a series of motion pictures directed by Luis Buñuel in the 1970s, but he was perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences for his role as the French drug baron Alain Charnier in The French Connection (1971) and its 1975 sequel. Rey was born into a prosperous family and studied architecture at the University of Madrid until he quit to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). He began working as a movie extra in 1936, and by 1960 the multilingual Rey had achieved moderate success acting in low-budget pictures and dubbing foreign films into Spanish. His breakthrough came as the lecherous Don Jaime in Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961). Rey superbly captured Buñuel’s vision of privileged decadence and obsession in their later collaborations, Tristana (1970), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977; That Obscure Object of Desire). Rey appeared in more than 100 other movies, including Orson Welles’sChimes at Midnight (1966), Lina Wertmüller’sSeven Beauties (1975), and Carlos Saura’sElisa, vida mia (1977; Elisa, My Love), for which he won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. He also starred as Don Quixote on Spanish television in 1992. Rey’s last film, Al otro lado del túnel (The Other Side of the Tunnel), was released shortly before his death.